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Pumpkin with Salt Meat
Peel the pumpkin, cut into thin slices, arrange in a baking-dish with a space in the middle for one pound of salt pork. The pork should be soaked in cold water over night, scored, and placed in the centre of the dish. Smoked salt pork is better than unsmoked. Sprinkle two tablespoonfuls of brown sugar over the pumpkin, add a cup
The text breaks off mid-sentence — "add a cup" of what is lost, most likely water or stock — so this needs reconstruction before it can be cooked. What survives is a clear enough method: sliced pumpkin baked around a piece of salt pork, sweetened, until both are tender.
- The missing liquidThe recipe ends at "add a cup," and the original quantity and ingredient cannot be recovered from this page. Water is the likeliest candidate, though this is a guess; a cup of liquid is enough to keep the pumpkin from scorching while it renders its own moisture.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given, as was normal in the period. A moderate oven — around 350F — for something in the region of an hour and a half would suit the method: the pork needs long enough to soften and the pumpkin long enough to collapse. The recipe as printed does not say whether the dish is covered.
- Salt pork todaySalt pork is still sold, usually as fatback or streaky belly in a brine or dry cure. The recipe's overnight soak in cold water should be observed: barrelled salt pork was generally saltier than the modern cured product, and even today's will make the dish very salty if the soak is skipped. Change the water once if you can.
- "Smoked salt pork"What the book means is closer to what a modern shop sells as slab bacon or unsliced smoked belly. Ordinary sliced bacon is cut too thin to sit in the centre of the dish and hold together.
- ScoringCutting the rind and fat in a crosshatch, not through to the meat, lets the fat render out into the pumpkin. This is the point of the dish — the pumpkin is the thing being flavoured, the pork is the seasoning.
- Which pumpkinUse a dense cooking squash — sugar pumpkin, kabocha, butternut — not a carving pumpkin, which is watery and stringy and will turn to slurry. The recipe says only "thin slices"; something around a quarter inch is a reasonable reading, since thicker slices will not soften in the time the pork takes.
- YieldNo yield is given. A pound of salt pork with a small pumpkin would plausibly serve four to six as a main dish, since the pork is rich and salty enough that a modest portion goes a long way.
Pumpkin and salt pork is a New England pairing of long standing, and it turns on the fact that both were things a household had in quantity through the winter: field pumpkins stored in a cool cellar, pork barrelled in brine after the autumn slaughter. Salt meat is often said to have been the mainstay protein of the American farm kitchen well into the nineteenth century, and it appears in cookbooks of the period at least as often as a way of getting fat and salt into bulk vegetables as it does as a dish in itself. The brown sugar here is doing the same work maple sugar or molasses does in baked beans — leaning into the sweetness the squash already has and setting it against the cure. That a book titled How to Cook Vegetables includes a pound of pork in a vegetable recipe says something about what "vegetable cookery" meant before the word implied meatlessness.